After teaching at UF for 38 % years, Dr. Sheng Li will be retiring at the end of the
Spring Term 2006.
"I was interviewing with industry at the time," said
Li. "When I interviewed with GE in Syracuse, I
knew it was not the place I wanted to be during
the winter time."
Drs. Fred Lindholm and Ken Watson convinced
Li to come to UF. A decision that Li has never
regretted.

Li became interested in long wavelength infrared
detectors and arrays while working on a multi- dis-
cipline optoelectronic project at UF in 1989. The
research on quantum well infrared photodetector
(QWIP) he did in this area has led to the devel-
opment of QWIP focal plane arrays (FPAs) for a
wide variety of long wavelength infrared night vi-
sion camera applications.
Even though he will be retired, Li will still be busy. He has been invited to be a
Visiting Chair Professor with his alma mater, the National Cheng Kung University
(NCKU) in Taiwan, where he will be spending a month or two next year in the
Electrical Engineering Department of NCKU in Tainan. He will also spend time
visiting with his children and grandchildren in San Francisco and Boston.

Li received his Ph.D. from Rice University in 1968. During his career, he has pub-
lished 153 journal articles and 131 conference papers, three book chapters, one
graduate textbook, and one monograph. He was given the UF Top 100 Research
Achievement Awards in 1989 and 1990. He received the inaugural Professorial
Excellent Program award in 1996. In 2000, he was named as a UF Research
Foundation Professor (UFRF) in recognition of his distinguished record of research.
In 2003, he received the 21st Century Award for Achievement by the International
Biographical Center. He is a Life Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronics Engineers. He supervised 35 Ph.D. and 45 M.S. students at UF.
His areas of research include transport properties and defect charac-
terization of semiconductor and silicon-on-insulator materials, quan-
tum well and quantum dot infrared photodetectors, optoelec-
tronic devices, radiation effects in GaAs solar cells,
and CulnSe2 thin film solar cells.

ECE Junior faculty Mem6er pceives

NS F CareerAward

Assistant Professor Rizwan Bashirrulah received
a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty
Early Career Development (CAREER) award,
the NSF's most prestigious award for new faculty
members.

Bashirullah received the CAREER award for his
proposal "CAREER: Ultra Low Power Passive
Microsystems for Medication Compliance
Monitoring".

This NSF Career proposal focuses on the devel-
opment of ultra low power silicon-based passive
microsystems for deep in-body communications.
Central to the concept of in-body communication
passive devices is the idea of RF energy scav-
enging from weak incident fields using power
conditioning circuits. While the current state of
the art passive microsystems for implantable de-
vices and even commercially available transpon-
ders communicate via backscattering of incident
waves, the power levels that are generated by the
implant device inside biological tissues are limited
at best by the instantaneous incident power from
the external source. The aim of this project is to
investigate new fully integrated circuit topologies
capable of scavenging energy from weak incident
fields with low peak amplitudes and re-radiating,
from deep inside the body, externally detectable
amounts of power using short bursts of energy.
A specific high-impact engineering application
of this miniature passive device is in medication
compliance monitoring. It is estimated that
the annual cost to the U.S. healthcare system
from non-compliance with medication regimens
exceeds $100 billion. For instance, a low cost
orally ingestible pill with an embedded passive
microsystem disposed of via the GI-tract and
capable of communicating with devices external to
the body can lead to an improved indirect method
for monitoring a patient's adherence to a regimen.

The proposed work is also intended to promote
interest in multidisciplinary research that will
provide graduate, undergraduate and high school
students exposure to innovative integrated circuit
technologies.

Bashirullah joined the faculty in 2004. He received
his doctoral degree from North Carolina State
University in 2004. His current research focuses
on circuit design tech-
niques for high-perfor-
mance analog/digital
VLSI, electronic circuit
devices and technol-
ogy, high-speed sig-
naling techniques and
circuits for biomedical
applications.

The Career program
is the NSF's most
prestigious award for /
new faculty members, -
designed to recognize ,
and support the early
career-development activities of those teacher-
scholars who are most likely to become the aca-
demic leaders of the 21st century. Each award
carries a substantial grant to support the faculty
member's research.

Lesa !Re 4fceives DistinguishedCareer

Achievement Award

Lesa Roe was honored as an ECE Distinguished
Career Alumnus on April 9, 2006 at the Eta Kappa
Nu (HKN) Spring Banquet. The award, the high-
est given to an alumnus by the department, was
presented to Roe by Mark Law, chair of ECE.

Roe started her engineering career performing sat-
ellite communications analysis for Hughes Space
and Communications in El Segundo, California

She began her NASA career at Kennedy Space
Center (KSC), Florida, in 1987 as a radio frequen-
cy communications engineer in the Space Shuttle
Engineering Directorate. From 1990 through
1999, Roe successfully managed the processing
and launch of multiple payloads through the KSC
Payload Processing Directorate and International
Space Station (ISS) Hardware Integration Office.

From 1999 through 2003, she managed the
ISS Payloads Office at Johnson Space Center,
Houston. She was responsible for development,
integration, and on-orbit operations of ISS re-
search and technology payloads.

"I loved launching payloads like the Hubble Space
Telescope and International Space Station into
orbit," said Roe.
"Knowing you are
a part of some-
2004 se thing like that and
c -- t I your work makes it
.- .successful is very
satisfying."

In 2003, she
moved to the
Langley Research
Center as the
Associate Director
for Business
Management. In
2004, she was named Deputy Director of Langley
Research Center. In October 2005, she took the

reins as the new Director of the center where she
is responsible for the center's aeronautical and
space research programs, as well as facilities,
personnel and administration.

Roe is enjoying her new position and responsibili-
ties. "It is focused more up and out than my previ-
ous jobs," she said. "It's exciting to be a part of
this new vision."

Roe earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical
Engineering degree from the University of Florida
in 1986 and a Master of Science degree in electrical
engineering from the University of Central Florida
in 1991. She completed executive management
programs at Harvard University, the University of
Michigan and Smith College.

She received the NASA Exceptional Service
Medal, NASA Superior Accomplishment Award
and a NASA Continuous Improvement Award.

Langley Research Center, founded in 1917, is
the nation's first civilian aeronautical research
facility and NASA's oldest field center.

... UNIVERSITY OF
FLORIDA
The Foundation for The Gator Nation.

New Rsearch Center Under Development

CHREC (pronounced "Shreck") is a new research
center under joint development at the University
of Florida and the George Washington University,
under the auspices of the Industry/University
Cooperative Research Centers (1/UCRC) program
at the National Science Foundation.

The mission of the Center for High-performance
Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC) is to investi-
gate, develop, and evaluate new concepts, meth-
ods, infrastructure, and tools in reconfigurable
high performance computing (HPC) and High-
Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC),
from building-block devices to infrastructure to
applications, and advance these technologies
through research and education for the benefit of
Center members, students, and the discipline at
large. CHREC will be a consortium of universities
and leading industry and government partners.
Prospective membership in the Center includes
R&D groups from major aerospace and defense
industries (e.g. Boeing, Honeywell, Lockheed-
Martin, Rockwell Collins, Smiths Aerospace),
Reconfigurable Computing (RC) equipment com-
panies (e.g. Cray, Nallatech, Xilinx), national labs
(e.g. Oak Ridge National Laboratory), federal
agencies (e.g. Air Force Research Laboratory,
NASA, NSA), and RC tools companies (e.g. Aldec,
Celoxica, Impulse).

Given the importance of this relatively new area,
expertise and resources in academia, and limited
R&D budgets in industry, a new I/UCRC Center
would be ideally situated to explore key research
challenges of specific interest to its industry and
government membership and beyond. The univer-
sity team at UF and GWU developing this Center
possesses the expertise, experience, base of high-
quality graduate students, cutting-edge facilities,

and administrative commitment to support this en-
deavor, as well as a record of success on related
topics with a number of leading organizations in in-
dustry and government. The thrust of the research
thrust proposed for CHREC includes: device and
core building blocks; HPC and HPEC systems and
services; design automation methods and tools;
and reconfigurable and parallel algorithms and
applications. These four focal points will be for-
mulated in terms of key figures of merit including:
performance, scalability, reliability, fault tolerance,
resource utilization, power consumption, density,
etc., with a keen interest in new methods as well
as tradeoff analyses.
CHREC will establish the first university/industry
research center in the U.S. for this fast-growing
and increasingly important field of computer en-
gineering. Research results will lead to new con-
cepts, technologies, and tools in reconfigurable
HPC and HPEC. Experience in rapid technology
transfer via the I/UCRC structure, will enrich and
expand our nation's lead in these vital industries
and technologies.
The high-performance reconfigurable computing
paradigm is critical for our nation. While still in
its infancy, challenges abound due to the lack of
common standards and research agenda that ad-
dresses issues of the common good. CHREC will
have a direct impact on the success of this area
as a whole, by helping support a national research
and development plan and serving as a catalyst
that brings major industries and users together to
define common standards. Research results will
be integrated into the educational process at each
university with expanded programs at multiple
levels in ECE, allowing state-of-the-art tools to be
leveraged.

I tE GEORGE
WASHINGTON
UNIVERSITY

In 9temoy ofOr. Giuseppe Basi& *Lwh~

On Sunday morning, while many residents celebrated
Easter, Dr. Giuseppe Basile died in a tragic airplane
crash at the Gainesville Regional Airport.

Dr. Giuseppe Basile was a retired emeritus profes-
sor in the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering at the University of Florida. Italian born,
Giuseppe Basile, loved to fly airplanes, dedicating his
entire adult life to aviation research. He was 69 years
old.

Among his many accomplishments, in 1961 Dr.
Basile won the Sartori Prize while at the University
of Bologna and the Valluri Prize from the Association
of Elettrotecnica Italiana. He graduated Summa Cum
Laude from the University of Bologna, and in 1964
he received his Libera Docenza or State Doctorate in
Applied Electronics from Bologna.

In 1975, Dr. Basile
came to UF to work
in the Center for
Mathematical System
Theory under the di-
rection of Dr. Rudolf
Kalman. Dr. Basile's
field of expertise was
mathematical systems
theory, intelligent ma-
Sa chines, robotics, and
avionics. While at
UF, he taught Electric
Circuits I and II,
Signals and Systems,
Motor Control, Linear
Control, Nonlinear Systems, Digital Control, Sensors
and Actuators, to name just a few of the courses. Dr.
Basile retired from the University of Florida in 1999.

College of Engineering Dean Pramod Khargonekar
said of him, "I first met Dr. Basile when I arrived at UF
as a graduate student in the fall of 1978 and got to know
him well subsequently. He was one of the nicest human
beings I have ever known. He had an enormous talent
for automatic controls and flying. His enthusiasm for
autopilots was infectious. He was an inspiring teacher
who loved his students."

Dr. Basile, along with his colleague, Dr. Giovanni Marro,
is recognized internationally for his work in controlled
and conditioned invariance. They also pioneered the
field of geometric approaches to linear systems. In

1992, Dr. Basile and Dr. Marro coauthored a textbook
titled, Controlled and Conditioned Invariants in Linear
System Theory. The book is based on material devel-
oped by the authors for introductory courses in System
Theory and advanced courses on multivariable Control
Systems at the Universities of Bologna and Florida.

While pursuing his interests in theoretical mathematical
controls, Basile developed a passion for avionics and
dedicated himself to the design of airplane flight con-
trols and data instrumentation. Dr. Basile was a certi-
fied pilot for over 38 years and conducted flight control
research, in particular automatic flight control design,
for over 34 years. Basile held at least two patents and
published over 61 journal articles and conference pro-
ceedings.

Dr. Basile lived part time in Bologna and part time in
Gainesville. In both cities he focused his energies
on the improvement of autopilot systems. Among his
proudest accomplishments was the AP-1, an autopilot
system Basile designed in 1973 while at the University
of Bologna, one that he continued to perfect, result-
ing in the AP-2 manufactured by the Italian Company
O.C.E.M., and the AP-2B, approved for manufacture in
the U.S. in 1982. The most advanced of the autopilot
systems originating from Dr. Basile's designs is the AP-
3C, manufactured by Chelton Aviation and certified by
the FAA in 2001. The AP-3 has been approved for use
in 19 different aircraft types and installed in over 150
systems.

According to Jim Smisek of Chelton Aviation, "His
exuberance for general aviation and life in general will
be missed by all. His efforts will be continued by the
individuals whom he personally trained and mentored
at Chelton Aviation."

Had he lived, Dr. Basile certainly would have continued
to contribute significantly to the aviation industry. Dr.
Robert Sullivan former Chairman of UF's Department
of Electrical Engineering and former Vice Provost
of Florida International University said, I flew with
Giuseppe many times in his experimental plane-it
was a highlight of my life."

In addition to research contributions and teaching at
the University of Florida, Dr. Basile taught a variety of
courses at three Italian Universities--Bologna, Genoa,
and Bari. Dr. Basile was a tenured faculty member of
the University of Bologna where he held a Chair in
Automatic Control. He also taught at the University of

California and conducted research at Case Institute of
Technology in Cleveland, Ohio.

In 1994, Dr. Basile negotiated a cultural and scientific
exchange program between the University of Florida
and the University of Bologna. The exchange pro-
gram formalized a long-standing working relationship
between the Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering and the University of Bologna and included
control theory, computer engineering, and lightning re-
search. In the 1990s, a number of Italian and American
engineering students and faculty participated in the
program.

While many will remember him as a respected profes-
sor, engineer, and scientist, those who knew him best
will always remember Dr. Basile's love for his birthplace-
Italy. Like many other Italian-Americans, he treasured
what both cultures offered and lived life between two
worlds- one Italian and one American. He was a free
spirit--a lovely man with a fun loving personality, who
enjoyed life to the fullest. He was an avid sportsman
who loved to ski, jog, and play tennis. In the end, Dr.
Giuseppe Basile died doing what he loved most-fly-
ing.

In emory ofSteve Varosi

The plane crash at the Gainesville Regional Airport also
took the life of Mr. Stephen Varosi, a graduate of the
University of Florida. Steve, a native Floridian born in
Rockledge, Florida was 40 years old. He received his
Bachelor's degree from the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering in 1987 and his Master of
Science degree from the Department in 1991.

Steve was an excellent student. Drs. Giuseppe Basile
and Haniph Latchman co-chaired his graduate commit-
tee. Dr. Thomas Bullock was also a member of that
committee. His master's thesis was titled, "Computer-
Aided Spectral Analysis and Identification of Analog
Signals and Systems."

Steve's long friendship with professor Dr. Basile lead
him to collaborate in Basile's autopilot research. Steve
had often flown with Basile and shared the same love
of aviation technology. Steve was working with Dr.
Basile and Chelton Aviation in the design of the user
interface for an autopilot system, including a magnetic
direction-finding device, PC board design, embedded

processor programming, and analog and digital test
instrumentation.

Steve was an outstanding engineer with a variety of
research interests. After graduation, he worked at
Alachua based Tucker-Davis Technologies, founded
by Tim Tucker, UF Electrical Engineering graduate.
Tucker-Davis Technologies develops real-time signal
processing systems for neurophysiology, psychophys-
ics, bioacoustics, and virtual acoustics.

Steve also worked for the Gainesville based engineer-
ing companies Applied Resonance Technology (ART)
and MRI Devices Corporation (the company with
which ART merged), from 1993 until 2003. ART was
co-founded by Dr. Randy Duensing, a friend of Steve's
and graduate of the University of Florida. Steve Varosi
collaborated with Dr. Duensing on research to improve
the signal-to-noise in magnetic resonance imaging
(MRI) and spectroscopy (MRS) and they received an
international patent titled, Method and Apparatus for
Enhanced Multiple Coil MR Imaging."

"Steve left MRI Devices to help commercialize the
auto-pilot that he and Dr. Basile designed. The well-
known avionics company, Chelton, bought the technol-
ogy and has made it available for a number of small
airplanes. Steve worked extensively with Chelton the
last two years to make the auto-pilot compatible with
other planes and to improve
cost and manufacturability,"
said Dr. Duensing.

Most recently, Steve Varosi
had been leading a research
effort at another Gainesville
based engineering compa-
ny, Convergent Engineering
Inc. Dr. Neil Euliano, also
a UF electrical engineer-
ing graduate, directs
Convergent Engineering.
The Small Business
Innovative Research project
Steve was working on is
titled "Electronic Pills for Medication Compliance" and
involves biocompatible RF detection and signaling.
Steve was collaborating with Dr. Rizwan Bashirullah;
Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and
Computer Engineering. Steve Varosi was a young man,
yet he contributed much to Gainesville's engineering
community.

Kew graduate recruiting Video Rteased

At the end of Fall Term 2005, the department released a video to assist in the recruitment of students to
our graduate program. It highlights the five research divisions in the department and includes interviews
with faculty, graduate students, and alumni.
DVDs were sent to students admitted to the Fall 2006 class so they could get a feel for the university
before they arrive. DVDs are also being sent to high-potential students who have been identified through
various talent identification programs. The DVDs will also be used to enhance minority recruiting.
The video can be viewed online using Real Player at: rtsp://www.ece.ufl.edu/Movies/RealPlayer/
ece_recruiting.rm

t D D J K F war Wiinners:
The Electric E Award is the highest award given to an un-
dergraduate student majoring in electrical and co mputer
engineering. To receive this award a graduating senior
must have a grade point average of 3.9 GPA or higher in
both upper division and electrical engineering courses.

q7=qy Nfews
Dr. Vladimir Rakov will receive the 2005 Editors' Citation for Excellence
in Refereeing for Geophysical Research Letters. This prestigious award
will be presented during the Editors' Evening at theAmerican Geophysical
Union Joint Assembly in May.
Dr. John Shea was granted tenure and promoted to Associate
Professor.

Sias Vndergraduate Scholarship Witing Contest

F. Ralph Sias (1905-1991) graduated from the University of Florida in
1928 with a B.S.E.E. degree. During his years in the engineering field,
he specialized in measurements -- electrical, mechanical, fluidics and
optical. He received the Outstanding Invention of 1952 Award from the
GE Meter and Instrument Department and a total of eighteen U.S. and
several foreign patents.

The scholarship was created in 2003 by his son. The writing contest is
open to all undergraduate students majoring in electrical and computer
engineering and the winners of the contest receive scholarship money.